Synopsis: Two American Soldiers are trapped by a lethal sniper, with only an unsteady wall between them.

Set in a sandy wasteland during the final days of the Iraq war in 2007, The Wall is a low-budget thriller that manages to be political and apolitical simultaneously. Unlike most war movies, The Wall is uninterested in preaching any kind of morality, whether it’s the necessity or calamity of war, and instead uses a fleeting 81 minutes to clench the viewer into a gripping will-he-or-won’t-he survival story.

The film has three characters: U.S. Army counter-sniping team Sergeant Isaac (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), Staff Sergeant Matthews (WWE star John Cena) and a mysterious Iraqi sniper just waiting to ensnare them in his trap. Isaac and Matthews are the kind of bros whose exchanges with one another have devolved into homoerotic banter, swearing and dumb jokes about their genitalia. Even in 2017, the depiction of the stereotypical, hyper-masculine American soldier involves tedious moments of homophobia – suggesting that this somehow allows such characters to deal with the heavy physical and mental strains of their job.

After 20 hours of sweltering in the heat as camouflaged bushes, Isaac and Matthews decide to take a closer look at their assignment: a mysterious shootout of a pipeline construction project. From their distance, the soldiers have been able to suss out only sparse details about who shot whom with their sniper scope cameras. As soon as they get closer though, the Iraqi sniper deftly shoots them out, and a barely surviving Isaac manages to find shelter behind a short wall, the remains of an Iraqi school.

Isaac spends the rest of the movie using a busted radio to talk to “Juba” (Laith Nakli), a sadistic, U.S.-trained Iraqi insurgent who has successfully captured dozens of U.S. soldiers in his spider web. Lacking a radio connection, water and a functional knee, Isaac has few options other than bleeding out – precisely the death Juba planned for him.

David James/Amazon Studios and Roadside Attractions via AP

But where there’s a will – or a wall – there’s a way for Isaac to survive his distant tormentor, and for the viewer to actually enjoy a movie that is mostly set behind a bunch of decaying bricks. For little more than a genre exercise, The Wall is exceptional in its direction. Director Doug Liman (The Edge of Tomorrow, The Bourne Identity) makes the most of the low-budget production set in a desert, ratcheting up tension about the sniper’s unknown location as Isaac divides his time between taking care of his shot knee – complete with torturously dragged-out scenes where he has to, for example, grit his teeth and extract the bullet – and trying to determine where Juba may be hiding.

The Wall also divides its time between claustrophobic shots of Taylor-Johnson, who is competent in a fairly demanding role, and the perspective of both Isaac’s and Juba’s scope cameras, which heightens the tension of the mystery.

When it comes to their actual conversation, however, The Wall relies on staid maxims and ideas about American foreign policy that are only there to flimsily flesh out the characters. Do we need to prove in every single American film that Islamic terrorists are intelligent enough to understand and even appreciate Western culture, as The Wall does with Juba’s incessant quotes from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven? Or his constant badgering of Isaac’s continued role in the war? The emotional resolution of that question never pays off because Isaac is never fleshed out as more than a video game character who must survive for the story to continue.

The Wall may be entertaining and masterfully directed – notable traits for a tiny budget – but it has nothing to say about war survival, other than a reductive depiction of its sheer difficulty.